


Bruises and Bitemarks

by Bubosi



Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: Because there's gonna be death, Dysfunctional Relationships, It's definitely going to be messed up, Mute Runner Five, Rating May Change, Season 2 spoilers, Season 3 Spoilers, Simon/Five may remain platonic, we shall see
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2017-12-11
Packaged: 2019-02-05 04:57:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 11,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12787470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bubosi/pseuds/Bubosi
Summary: Life is direly unfair sometimes, and Five knows this better than anyone. Life takes it a little far, however, when Five finds herself mortally injured far from home, and further from any reliable source of help.In a pinch, she supposes Simon will do for her last request.Things become more complicated when her time comes and passes, and she doesn't die.[Rating may change in later chapters]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspiration hit while I was running Mission 18 of Season 3, and you know what, there just isn't enough dwelling on the deeply dysfunctional potential of Runner Five and Simon being forced together by circumstance. 
> 
> So here's my attempt at exploring their fantastic dynamic, I have no idea where it's going, but it's going somewhere fast.

The trial had been going better than expected, which should have alerted Five to the fact that death was imminent. Nothing ever seemed to go smoothly anymore, not where it counted. And getting into that Comansys lab, finding the missing people from Abel? That ranked pretty highly on Five’s list of Things That Counted.

The spray Veronica had synthesised from various undead bodily fluids and the peculiar vines had been keeping the undead from tearing them apart so far, but it only lasted so long and they were running out of decoys. Another of the collared zombies fell under the teeth of its fellows and Five was no longer sure which way through the hoard was out. Neither she nor Veronica were tall enough to see above the heads of the shambling bodies and they’d gotten turned around while messing about, celebrating the feeling of freedom Veronica’s success brought.

Sam wasn’t seeing any easy route out for them either, calling out commands only to redact them, cursing himself, the zombies, the situation. He was no longer in control, and the hysteria in his voice made it painfully clear that he knew this. Runner Five was, once again, in mortal peril. It would almost be just another Tuesday if only there weren’t so many of the things.

Five and Veronica were on their own, and the zombies were beginning to take notice. All sixty, eighty, hundred or more of them.

“I think, Runner Five, I think we’ve run out of time. The spray,” Veronica swallowed down the crack in her voice. “The spray only has a limited effect and we’ve been running, raising our body temperature. Burning it off more quickly.” Her eyes flickered frantically, her lips moving as she ran through and dismissed all the ways she could think to fix this under her breath.

 _“Go,_ ” Five signed, tapping Veronica on the arm. _“Go, you have to run.”_

“I’m not going to just run blindly through the hoard! This is my stupid mistake, we can fix this.”

“What?” Sam called over the radio, interrupting his own frantic, half-aborted plans of guiding them out of the steadily amassing throng of undead bodies. “No, no you’ll both be fine! We just need, God, we just need a clear route out. Or a distraction. But there’s no one near you, God. Stay put, I’ll try to raze Runners Four and Sixteen.”

With a crackle of static, Sam was gone. It was just the two of them, and there were undead eyes beginning to fix on them.

 _“Do you have any more,”_ Five signed, then frantically tapped at her neck. They’d lost sight of the last decoy zombie a minute ago and if Sam couldn’t magic up a distraction they’d have to make their own.

“The collars? But we might attract even more of them. The woods might be surrounded.”

Five pointedly looked around them at the hundred or so zombies that were already surrounding the two of them, then back at Veronica. _“Rather be eaten now than later?”_

“I suppose that’s a good point,” Veronica conceded, her mouth twisting in displeasure as she began to root around in her bag for one of the controls she hadn’t already used. “I must have at least one left, I didn’t set them all off, I know I didn’t.”

Five side-stepped a swaying, one-and-a-half legged shambler and sidled closer to Veronica, putting her back to her. Her right hand loosened her axe from its snug hold on the side of her pack, her left rested on the butt of her gun. She took a moment in the eye of the storm to reflect on how she used to genuinely enjoy science, in the time before. Before zombies, before ‘science’ ceased to mean reading issues of National Geographic and instead morphed into having experiments performed on her in various unpleasant ways.

At least in this instance, Five reflected, she wasn’t handcuffed to anything. She would have the full, free use of her limbs while being torn apart by the rotten mouths of the undead.

Her headset buzzed. “Nothing yet, sorry guys, I’m working on it! Runner Sixteen is too far away and Jodie is having her own undead problems. But don’t worry, we’ll figure something out, we’ll get out of there-”

“Yes! I knew I had one left!” Veronica spoke over Sam, holding up the small remote triumphantly, and pressing the button. Above the sound of the constant moans and dragging footsteps, they heard nothing. No small bang of the release mechanism, no ‘poof’ of released pheromones. “What?” Veronica pressed the button again, but the little light on the remote remained green instead of turning red like the others had.

Five tilted her head, and raised her hand from her axe to sign _“What?”_

“It can’t not be working, that’s absurd.” Veronica said, pointing the remote off into the crowd and trying it again. And then again, swinging her hand around thirty degrees, still nothing. And again. And again, only this time her hand was caught by another and the zombie that was probably once an accountant moaned loudly, sinking chipped nails into Veronica’s forearm as it reared forward, mouth wide.

Veronica shrieked, and her hand flailed for something, anything, to hit the zombie away and Runner Five didn’t think. There was just the zombie and the girl and then there was Runner Five between them, bashing its head away with an elbow strike to the temple. Then she hit it again, forcing its head away from Veronica until it refocused on Five and reached for her instead, and the second it gave was what Five needed to draw her gun and shoot the thing straight through the eye.

For a blessed second there was silence, then the moaning began anew, a cacophonous warbling and gargling as the hoard turned inward, seeking prey.

“Oh God, Five,” Sam began, but didn’t manage to finish, as then everything started to move far too quickly.

Five gripped Veronica by the shoulder and wheeled her around, pushing her forward. _“Go go go,”_ Five signed, pointing where there were glimpses of green occasionally between the bodies. Stumbling from the shove, Veronica found her feet in a run and kept going, eyes wide and unblinking.

“Go where? Go where, Five, is this your plan? Run and hope for the best?” Veronica glanced to her left to see Five’s answer, then the right. “Five?” She looked back over her shoulder and caught the runner’s eyes for a moment before the noisemaker began to wail and the zombies closed the space between them.

“Sam! Sam, what is she doing?” Veronica called, but all that answered was the moans of the dead and the realisation that their only headset had been left with Runner Five. Veronica was on her own, and all she had was Five’s last order. Go. So Veronica ran, away from where Five had stood with her axe and her gun, and towards where the field opened in front of her. The dead shambled past, turning towards the sound of gunfire and the noisemaker, and towards the most human-smelling thing left in the field.

Veronica ran, back past the cages they had released the zombies from, back to the safety of the vine-tangled woods where she finally turned around. From the trees above the field she watched the hoard seethe and ebb around a central point, where there were too many of them to tell what was happening or what they were doing. But whatever it was, she didn’t see Five come out, and she heard no more gunshots.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Second chapter is a go, and here comes the actual action!
> 
> Or, at least, the start of it. Things pretty much go downhill from here.

There was a of kind of clarity, Five had found, in the moments before certain death. It was one thing to panic when something cold and rotten grabbed you in the dark, the sudden intense fear that sent a shot of adrenalin straight to the heart. It was something else entirely to watch everything around you gradually go to hell and know there was no real chance of seeing another tomorrow.

Five figured you could either take a seat and let the world wreck its horror upon you, or you could give it the last-stand’s equivalent of a middle finger.

The latter option had worked out for Five in the past, which was how she found herself with one hand yanking her axe from where it had stuck in zombie cranium and the other jamming her gun against a peeling temple. Using bullets against the undead was practically a sin most of the time, when you could just avoid them or use a bat, but Five’s options were numbering in the negative so she only paused for a heartbeat before pulling the trigger.

Not pausing to watch the brain spray, Five spun to smack back the nearest next zombie with the butt of her half-empty gun. They were all noticing her now, whether it was the noise or the smell she didn’t know, but it had to be all of the hoard now. It had to be. Five couldn’t stay in the middle of the hoard much longer, so it would have to do.

Her plan, such as it was, relied on getting as many of them to follow her as possible and to lead them away from where she had pushed Veronica. Difficult as the girl might have been so far, Five wasn't about to let her die. This meant staying in the middle and making noise. This meant they had begun to come for her flesh, and Five had not stopped moving once and she didn’t know if it had been twenty seconds or twenty minutes.

Any time spent surrounded by the undead felt like forever. All Five had to do was hold out a little longer, just until there was a tiny break in the sunward side of the hoard, then she could force her way out. Try not to get bit on the way.

Until then, it was just a matter of keeping them at bay. Keeping them from pressing in and overwhelming her.

Drive the axe through that one’s neck, kick the one beside it over. Push them both down, half spin, shove it back, quarter spin, pistol whip, axe to the temple. Spin, hit, repeat. Check your six. Nine. Twelve. Three. Again. Axe is getting blunt, think about changing to the bat. No time.

“Five, Five please! You have to get out of there! You have to run!” Sam’s voice cut into her rhythm and Five paused on her turn to three ‘o clock, almost stumbling over one of the twitching bodies she had downed. No good to be distracted, got to keep moving.

Five’s hands were full and so she reached up to her earpiece to tap it once, ‘ _no_ ’, and was about to throw herself back into her frantic defence when her eyes caught on something bobbing through the crowd.

“What do you mean ‘no’? Five, you’re surrounded! You have to go now before the entire hoard realises you’re there. They’ll tear you apart!”

It was a zombie, of course, but what had caught Five’s attention was around its neck. A thick black collar, with a small, flashing green light that indicated the collar was on. On, and capable of releasing the human-decoy pheromones if only Five could get to it. Her distraction. A ray of hope, maybe, if she could get the collar to work.

“Five? Why aren’t you moving? You have to- oh!” Sam’s voice stuttered through her headset. “Oh, yes, brilliant, Five. If you can just get to that zom and set off the pheromones you might be able to distract the others long enough to get out of the hoard. But, er, look out on your left.”

Weaving around the lurching shambler Sam had spotted, Runner Five dived into the thick of the hoard, beelining for the collared zombie. It was only a few meters away, but a good third of the zombies by now had noticed her human smell and were beginning to reach out, tattered fingers grasping. It was slow going, and Five had to sacrifice a couple more bullets to get there. There were four left in the gun, she thought, if she hadn’t lost count. At least four. Three more zombs, if necessary, and one left. Always one left.

Five reached her target and almost collided with it, saved from a particularly gross close-encounter by the zombie itself swaying away from her. Obeying the swarm mentality, still. Which meant there was still trace enough of the spray on Five’s skin to get out of the hoard. If the luck she’d never had held out.

The thing’s eyes were fixed in the thousand-yard stare common to the undead and Five tried not to pay its face any attention. She saw enough at a glance. Its lips were torn off, apparently chewed off, with the better part of its chin and neck. Its eyebrows, though as degraded as the rest of it, had at one point been meticulously plucked and Five distantly thought how funny that might have been if she wasn’t most likely about to be eaten alive.

Her gun Five shoved home into its holster on her thigh, and her axe she tucked under one arm. Her hands found the collar and fumbled for some kind of switch. If she survived this, Five thought, she would throw Veronica out of her own treehouse for making this harder than need be. Dying because the mini-McShell had neglected to add a manual switch to her decoys would be just too petty a fate after everything else Runner Five had endured.

Something caught under Five’s fingertips and she pressed it, then pushed on it, and the collar beeped and in the same moment she hissed out a breath in victory the zombie’s head dropped forward and sank its teeth into her forearm.

The collar unloaded the mix onto the zombie even as it bit down and Five swallowed the instinctive scream, punching it again and again in the jaw until something popped and it leg go just enough for her to wrench her arm free and push it away.

Five ran, tears in her eyes obscuring everything in front of her and she nearly stumbled into several zombies but they paid her no heed, intent upon reaching the strongest source of human scent and devouring it.

“Careful Five! Come on, you’re nearly there. I can’t believe that worked,” Sam laughed, high and breathless. “I can’t believe it. You’re going to be okay, just, just keep running. Just keep going and you’ll be safe. Every time there’s an experiment I say, this is the last time you’re using Five, and it always ends badly. Always. This time I mean it,” Sam unloaded, his anxiety unspooling through the headset. “This is definitely, definitely the last time.”

 _Oh_ , Five thought. _That’s in bad taste_.

She considered signing it, but the detached part of her that had taken over again now she was definitely going into shock noted that she would have to raise her arms into the camera’s view, and then Sam would see the bite. And Five didn’t want Sam to see the bite.

The thought of Sam’s reaction almost sent Runner Five stumbling, but she sucked in a breath and fixed her eyes on the grass ahead of her. Close, closer, and suddenly, gloriously, free. No zombies pressing in on every side. The air so fresh her lungs felt too large inside her ribcage with it.

And so she did what she knew best, and Runner Five picked up the pace and ran away from the hoard, away from the creeper forest, and away from Abel.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Even shorter than the last chapter, but don't good things come in small packages?
> 
> In this case, no. No, herein lies angst as Five says a goodbye she would give the world to avoid.

“Where are you going?”

Sam’s only answer was the regular sound of Five’s breathing and her footsteps on the loam of the field. The headcam showed only that she was running up a long slope, the hill opposite the woods where she and Veronica had come from. Five was going the wrong way, and she didn’t exactly know how to explain why.

“Five, I’ve got some of the area,” Sam interrupted himself with the clatter of his keyboard. “On camera. Most of it, I think, and I can guide you around the better part of the hoard and back into the woods. We just need to get you there and you’ll be safe. Those vines might be creepy, but they work.”

At her sides, Five’s hands flexed with the need to reply, to explain, to do something. But the panic was crawling like ants under her skin and it was taking all of her will not to break down. To tear at her arm where it burned and scream and scream until the world went away. So she kept her arms down and out of sight of the headcam.

“God, that was awful. But amazing! But mainly awful. It’ll be a story to tell when you’re home, right? Took on over a hundred zoms and came out swinging. That’s my Five! I could kind of see you on the cameras, you know. Swinging and ducking.”

Five slowed as she came to the top of the hill and looked up and down the long ridge, trying to get her bearings. She knew where she needed to go and she didn’t think she could get there with the time she had, but not trying could doom them all. She had bled too much for Abel to stop now.

First, though, there was something else she needed to do. Eight would have said she didn’t have time, that she could wallow when she was dead, but for once Five wasn’t listening to the ghostly chiding of the Sara that lived in her head. She wasn’t saying goodbye for her own sake.

“I wish I could have recorded that, you were fantastic. Woosh, splat! There goes half a zombie brain in one direction, the other half in another. All that spinning, you were like, oh! Go left along that hill, Five. It’s open, but at least if they can see you, you can see them, too. You’ll have the high ground.”

The hilltop was mostly open, bar some low hedges, but a little ways to the right there was a tree stump that Five estimated would come to about her waist. It would have to do, so she set off towards it.

“No, not right, left. Five, you’re going the wrong way. Can you hear me?”

The stump was utterly exposed on top of the hill and for a moment Runner Five balked at leaving such precious equipment out in the open where it would be at the mercy of the elements. She had to remind herself that Sam still had contact with Nadia, so if need be they could retrieve it. It wasn’t an option to take it with her. If she could hear Sam her will might fail, and that wouldn’t do.

Nadia would just have to take over.

Ah, Nadia, Five thought, as she came to a slow stop. It was typical that the moment they began to get on something like this would happen. She reached up, arms coming around the sides of her head to gently remove her headset.

“Five-”

Even though she had to, she still didn’t want to do this. It would hurt him. It might devastate him. Sam took everything personally, and they’d been close for almost a year now, and the end of the world made everyone either a lot colder or a lot clingier. It would fuck her up, too, but that was a less permanent issue since she wouldn’t have to live with it. Sam might blame himself, which Five was surprised to find stung more than the thought of not seeing tomorrow.

Kneeling carefully in front of the stump, Five took off her headset and arranged it carefully with the camera pointing towards her. Hopefully the angle wasn’t too appalling. If this was to be her last appearance it would be nice if it was half decent. Sam didn’t need to remember her looking like she was already dead.

“What are you doing with your headset? Five, is something wrong?”

Forcing her face into a shaky attempt at a smile, Five held her arm out to the camera and shrugged. The blood had run from the wound and pooled around her elbow and wrist as she ran and it looked horrendous. She lifted her hands into two shaky signs.

_“I’m sorry.”_

There was a moment of dead air. Five stared into the headcam and waited.

“What?”

_“I fucked up.”_

“No, no, no. Five, no no no no no! No, you can’t be bitten! Are you sure? Are you sure you didn’t hurt it somehow? Five, please, no, not you.” Sam’s voice cracked and Five could hear the tears forming. She could see his face, crumpled in pain, in her mind’s eye and she couldn’t help but sob, once. The rest she pushed down, down deep into her chest where it could burn with all the words she would never say.

“Please, tell me you’re lying, Five, please.” A pause, and footsteps, then through the static Five could hear Sam shouting out the door for Paula, for Janine, anyone. Then he was back at the console and his voice trembled as ‘no’s’ jumbled together into a constant stream of denial.

Five dashed at the tears forming in her eyes and lifted her hands again. _"Are you listening? You need to listen.”_

“Ugh, yes, yes I’m listening Five, but you need to come back, if you get back we can help you. Paula can put you on the dialysis machine, we can fix this. Come home Five, please, come home safe.”

_“It’s too far.”_

“No, no you can make it-”

_“I have a few hours, less.”_

“You’re the strongest person I know, Five, you can’t turn. You beat Van Ark, you can do anything, please don’t. Don’t,” Sam choked on what he was saying, and behind him Five could hear yelling and people in the background of the channel.

“Tell everyone I love them.”

“No-”

_“I love you all. You have been amazing, Sam.”_

“No, Five, you can’t.” The tremor in his voice reminded Five of all the times she’d huddled in the comms shack while she was off duty and just watched Sam work. How his voice trembled whenever he was frightened or elated. How his hands found their way into his hair when he panicked, feeling helpless.

_“Look after Abel for me.”_ Five said, her hands trembling so hard she could barely spell out ‘Abel’. She stared into the camera a moment more, wishing Sam was closer so she could have just one final too-tight hug. But it was time to go, and there was nothing else she could say. Standing, she waved, and ran away, towards the river bank that would lead her where she needed to go before the end came.

Sam’s voice called for her through the headset until she was too far away to hear it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Too sad? Not sad enough?
> 
>  
> 
> Never fear, next chapter we're back to highly traumatic violence.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is mostly suffering, but this time with some added murder.  
> [Definite warnings for violence and death in this one]
> 
> Five gets closer to her end goal, but it's not easy. It's never easy.

Every other river in England has the same name. It was a Celtic thing, Five knew. Centuries ago when the Romans had invaded they had attempted to map the wild tribal land they found and asked the native Celts what their hills and forests and rivers were called.

Celts, it turned out, were either a very frank or very sarcastic people. There were a lot of hills called “hill” and forests called “forest” and a frankly disproportionate number of rivers named “Ouse” because the cartographers didn’t bother to double check their work.

Ouse, of course, meant “river” and there was one near where Five had grown up. She had liked to go wading in her Ouse looking for frogs, and a famous author had drowned themselves downstream years before she was born. The one she was running along had a different history that she didn’t know, but Five had seen it on Janine’s maps of the area and knew eventually it would run close to the open moorland that was Deadlock territory. If she followed it long enough she would end up there, and then she planned on finding a high hill. Once she had a good view it wouldn’t be too hard to find the wood.

This was all elementary, of course, for now. It depended on her being able to follow the water the whole way there. The edge of the river bank was slippery and at times levelled out into a marsh that had Five leaping from one tussock to another to get across it. It wasn’t the fastest route, but if she diverted Five was sure she wouldn’t be able to find her way and then she would turn grey in the middle of nowhere, wandering aimlessly with a bag full of secrets strapped to her back.

The fever hadn’t hit her yet, there was only the constant hot pain in her right arm where she had been bitten. It pulsed in time with her heartbeat and flared with every jolting step. This meant she still had time. Not much, but some. Bandaging the bite had helped a little with the pain, though Five didn’t expect it to give her any more precious minutes.

Hopefully she had just enough time that if she began to fall apart before she got where she was headed, she would be close enough to his haunt that Simon might find her corpse and the things on it.

He wouldn’t have been her first choice, or even her tenth choice, of person to leave this mission to but Runner Five was fresh out of other options.

Traitor he may be, Simon would have to do.

Trusting him was an objectively terrible decision. Five had rehashed it over in her head several times already. He had abandoned Abel and his friends to a painful death once before, and now he was clearly a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Not to mention that he would be ridiculously hard to reach on account of being hidden deep in Deadlock territory, surrounded by a forest of grasping severed zombie bits.

It was the only decision Five could bring herself to make. If she returned to the tree fort or attempted to get back to Abel she would either have to kill herself or turn. Neither were particularly attractive options, even with the fool’s hope that she could get to Abel or New Campton in time for Paula to work some kind of medical magic. Considering this made the small package she kept in the bottom compartment of her backpack seem to weigh that much more. She couldn’t let it fall into the wrong hands.

Five had a duty, to Sara, to the Major, and now she couldn’t complete it because she was dying. So someone else had to take on the burden, as much as that made her cringe.

Amelia was never really a candidate. Despite being their new leader, Five trusted her about as much as she trusted the origin of Abel moonshine. Sam was also out. Even if he had the field skills and an appropriately secretive streak, which he didn’t, Five didn’t want to dump this responsibility on his head. He had enough on his shoulders already with the runners. The runners themselves, well. None of them had known Sara the same way Five had. None of them had been part of Greenshoot and after all that had happened Five wasn’t sure she could trust any of them with this.

So that left Janine. It pained Five, because hell if the woman didn’t already have enough on her plate, but there was no one else. Janine was the only one that she could both trust and would be capable of doing what needed to be done.

She couldn’t run those three days back to Abel in the few hours she had left, and even if that were possible there was no guarantee she could get Runner Eight’s gift to her without anyone else seeing. Or, God forbid, intercepting it.

But there was someone who had been sneaking around Abel for weeks now, so elusive that they were still just a spectre to most of the population.

Someone who seemed wracked with guilt, and obviously still harbouring a soft spot for Janine, whatever their relationship had been before.

If Five couldn’t deliver it herself, she figured that Simon was her next best bet. He could get in, get the package to Janine, and get out without being discovered. He could remain anonymous while satisfying some of the conflicted feelings he’d obviously been dealing with. The package could get to Janine, and Five could check out without dooming Abel via her carelessness.

A perfect plan, if Simon didn’t decide to screw them all over again. Five tried her best not to think about all the alternative things he could do with it if she got the package to him and wasn’t around to keep him in line. Best to just keep running. It was too late to turn back now, anyways.

Runner Five had chosen her path, and it led away from Abel, and away from the tree stump where she had left her last link to Sam.

She had been trying not to think about it. Five had been going maybe an hour now and she could only keep the panic at bay by outrunning it. The brambles raking across her legs, bare below her running shorts, helped with the distraction part. This was only temporary however, she didn’t exactly have the time to go out of her way to run through bushes to keep her focused.

The river bank cleared as the land turned from sharp hills to open rolling ones. Fields of once-crop began to be spotted with new growth of gorse and heather. The natural moor flora was reclaiming swathes of farmland and in another year all definition between the two would likely be lost.

Without the need to jump over swamp or keep her footing on the steep bank, Five was allowed time enough to think.

Her thoughts were mainly about home, it turned out. About Sam’s final, panicked calls for her to come back, the waver in his voice, the sharp keen of the headset trying to compensate for the volume of his voice. The mental image of him standing at his desk, yelling into the microphone. Of Janine joining him, shaking him. Maybe her façade cracking, as it sometimes did when things went so badly wrong. As it had when they’d lost others. Jodie coming back from her run to the news. Maybe never finishing the jumper Five wasn’t supposed to know she was making.

Jamie’s kids, God, the little ones. Catrina, alone now, waiting for the return of her King Jamie and the only other adult left she trusted. Ed and Mollie, little Mollie growing so fast. No more hunts for Hopper Five near the compost, or late-night talks with Ed. 

So many people she was running from. Janine, made of so many harsh edges her moments of softness or leniency were that much sweeter. Jack and Eugene’s bickering and strip poker games she could never, ever go to again. And Sam.

Five’s breath was coming far too fast even for her brisk pace and her throat felt like it was closing up, choking her. Behind her glasses Five blinked furiously against the tears and didn’t see the rabbit hole coming until her foot stuck in it and she went down flailing.

_Fuck._

Biting the inside of her cheek, Five braced against the pain in her ankle. This was all she needed. One emotional quibble and she was on her knees with a possibly-busted leg, still kilometres away from where she needed to be. As if the universe had decided this was not enough, there was also the issue of the heavily scuffed boots that had appeared in front of her face.

Rearing back, Five winced at the pain in her foot, landing heavily on her backside. Above her, gun aimed casually at the centre of her forehead, stood a tall, skinny man in a yellow high-vis jacket.

 _At least,_ Five thought absently as her eyes flicked between the barrel of the shotgun and the man’s squinted eyes, _this does mean I’m on the right track_.

 _“Hello,”_ Five waved, attempting to rearrange her foot into a position that didn’t feel like the tendons were being sliced at with a saw.

“Abel runner, huh? Looks like you’re far from home with nowhere to go.” He spoke through the bandana tied across the lower half of his face, the slight muffling failing to conceal the delight in his voice. The man put one foot on Five’s twisted ankle and pressed down. She hissed in pain and stopped fidgeting, putting her hands in the air and glaring. “Looks like you’ve got a nice full bag of something there, darling. Maybe you hand it over easy and we can make this quick and, well. Relatively painless for you.”

_No, no, shit._

The man pushed the barrel of the shotgun closer, leaning over Five so it pressed harshly against her forehead.

“That means now. I’d rather not have to clean your brains off it.”

 _God, this is going to suck,_ Five thought, bracing herself. Giving the package to the Deadlocks was just a step down from giving it straight to Comansys, so that wasn’t going to happen. Which meant the situation had to escalate. Five threw herself to the left and forward, gripping the gun with both arms and then dropping her full body weight onto it. The Deadlock yelled, and the gun went off. It set Five’s ears ringing, but he still dropped it rather than have his fingers broken and Five spun where she landed, throwing it to the side and into the river where it vanished with a splash.

Victory was brief and interrupted by Five being bowled over with a kick to the ribs that caused something to crack and a short scream to burn her throat as she choked it down. The man was above her then, long serrated knife swinging for her throat. Five planted both of her feet against his chest and pushed. He was heavy for a such a lean man but she pushed him out of range on the first swing. She grabbed his knife hand with one of hers on the next, and scrabbled at her side. The man snarled above her and smashed his fist into the side of Five’s face once, sending stars careening through her vision, then he raised his free hand to punch her again. Five hit cold metal before he could.

There, tearing it from its holster, she had her gun. Five swung it up and pulled the trigger but the Deadlock had thrown himself off her. He cursed, his eardrum blown, Five still had his arm held tight and he grabbed her wrist, lifting her and forcing her facedown and twisting until the pain forced her hand to spasm and let go of his knife arm.

His hand was on the back of her head and he made a noise like triumph but Five was twisting, twisting, and he may have had her head pinned but her legs were a runner’s and they were strong enough to force her body around and his hand instead went to her throat. The Deadlock’s weight fell on Five’s airway and she couldn’t breathe as he swung the knife but it didn’t matter because she still had her gun and she was faster.

His brain matter exploded out into the air. The spatter fell and painted the grass and the parts of Five not hidden under his limp corpse. Bits of what might have been eye dripped onto her face as she shoved him off, rolling him onto his back to soak the soil with what was left of his lifeblood.

Runner Five heaved in heavy, desperate breaths through her bruised windpipe, unable to retch for fear of suffocating. She sat up, staring across at his face, slack now, bandana askew over a patchy beard.

She had been wrong earlier. _Now_ she really needed that Sam hug.

The body twitched, and Five scrambled to face it fully, gun raised and an inch from his temple. A few seconds of listening and hearing only the frantic beating of her own heart in her ears, Five lowered the gun. It was just a post-mortem twitch. Happens with people, she reminded herself. Not with zombies. It had been a while.

Someone yelled from not far away, and closer still someone answered. Five wanted to cry. There were more of them and now she had just one bullet left. If she hadn’t lost count, which was possible. Just the one, and that one she needed to hang on to. There was no time to sit and recover, she had to be gone.

Carefully as she was able, Five climbed to her feet and tested out her ankle. It was tender, and when she put weight on it there was a stabbing pain. If she ran on it, it would get far worse later.

_There isn’t going to be a later._

Five looked wistfully, once, towards the river and the gun she had thrown away, and then turned and limped as fast as she could into the sparse trees that began to the left of the river bank. It wasn’t much cover, but it was some. If she was lucky this stretch of trees connected to the larger wood she was seeking. Once she was there none of this would matter. Her ankle, her ringing ears, or the sight of the life fleeing a person’s face barely inches from her own. Dealing with your problems was for the living.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The heavens open, the Deadlocks go for tea, and Five gets ahead.

Sometimes Five wondered who exactly saw humanity in its hour of greatest need and decided that, yes, now was the perfect time to join a ridiculous murder gang. And it wasn’t like it was just a handful of people. There were a lot of Deadlocks, enough at least to keep a fairly large area of the South West under their control. So who were they?

Who had they been?

It seemed too much to believe that any normal person would join them, but then again, Five had seen a great many normal people do a great many ridiculous things over the last year or so. The zombie cultists were proof enough of that. Perhaps it was easier to believe that the Deadlocks represented the collective population of all the UK’s prisons but it was more likely that a lot of otherwise average people had seen some lunatics with firepower and decided it was as safe a bet as any.

 _And of course_ , Five thought, staring balefully out from the gorse she was crouched beneath, _crazy begets yet more crazy. Whoever they were, there’s no reasoning with these people._

The Deadlocks had been alternating between shouting to each other and screaming at Five, telling her the many things that would befall her once they dragged her from whatever hole she was hiding in. It had been almost half an hour since Five’s fight with the man by the river during which time she’d made little progress across the moorland. It was largely open territory scattered with small boulders and scrub which made hiding hard and running perilous. Getting to Simon’s hideout was going to take her an age at this rate. One she didn’t have to spare.

Ignoring as best she could pain in her ankle and face, Five slunk out from the cover of the prickly plant and glanced around. No Deadlocks overlooking her position. Not right now. She was running before she could begin to doubt herself, sprinting half-doubled over and as close to the ground as she could go without dropping to all fours.

This was how she had been moving, in short bursts from cover to cover, but the Deadlocks seemed to know that she was somewhere in the area and progress was slow. They must have seen her make a break for the trees from the opposite river bank. That, or they had guessed where she was going and didn’t know it was her at all. They could think she was Simon. While the threats they were shouting were quite specific as to the various ways they might kill her, none of them had called her anything but curses.

The one Five had killed had called her “Abel Runner”. Not that their not knowing who she was helped her at all. Whether they thought she was an Abel spy or the King of Sudan they were still trying to murder her. Bullets were also a lot more deadly to her than they were to the Phantom of Abel.

That still made Runner Five’s skin crawl. The idea of immortality wasn’t so unattractive if she was honest with herself, she could get that, but what Simon had become was something unholy. Unholy and half gone, in mind and body.

His face was still a mystery to her, but despite her morbid curiosity about most things this was something else. A question she didn’t think she wanted an answer to. His missing hand was particularly telling; he couldn’t die, but he couldn’t heal. Whatever was done to him stayed done. His curse was different from whatever Van Ark had managed to do to himself.

Five hadn’t seen the remains of the professor up close, but she had been the one to pull the trigger and even from a distance she had seen that there was no part of that plane that remained unburnt. If he still lived, like he did sometimes in the dreams she woke from sweating and crying, he would have been so much twitching charcoal until his healing factor returned. If it ever did.

Simon didn’t have the same uncanny ability that sealed a slashed throat in a second and could grow back whole limbs given a day.

If he was ever burnt to a cinder, or trapped underwater and drowned, or bitten to tiny pieces, would he still live? How much would have to be done to him to finally kill him? Could anything kill him now?

Five couldn’t help her shudder as she ducked into the shadow of a tall patch of heather. Without the release of death, Simon could suffer forever. It would be hell. If it weren’t for the proximity of the Deadlock voices Five might have chanced a bitter laugh. Simon had almost doomed hundreds of lives to escape it, and hell had found him. No wonder he’d lost a few marbles.

_And you’re going to trust him? Not your best plan, Five._

It was one of her thoughts that sounded suspiciously like Sara. That was a thing that had started with her death. Not that Five didn’t keep the voices of the dead with her already. Sometimes when she was with Jamie she could almost hear Archie, the things she would say, the delight she carried with her like her own tiny sun. Lighting up a world struggling against the encroaching dark.

The voices moved away from Five’s position, further down into a natural dip in the land, and she skulked away from them. Not directly up, or she’d be visible for miles, but along the hill, heading roughly North-East.

Her route was mainly reliant on avoiding the Deadlocks. Five was trying to recall where the sun had been before when she ran this route. When it had been in her eyes, how the light had slanted through the leaves of the wood, what time of day it was.

It was hardly the most exact method of orienteering, but she didn’t have much of an alternative. This, and her instinctive sense of direction, was all Five had to guide her. Especially now the sun was vanishing behind dark clouds that were purpling like a bruise.

And so Five continued, darting from cover to cover, avoiding the Deadlocks, until the sky broke open. Ten minutes into the downpour the Deadlocks seemed to give up, regrouping and piling into a soft top Landrover which vanished quickly over the horizon. Not, of course, without reminding her in no uncertain terms they'd get even for the death of their friend. Five didn’t blame them for giving up.

The rain was falling in fat, heavy drops that soaked her through in seconds, even beneath the boughs of heather. It was briefly pleasant, to have the sweat and blood and mud washed from her hair and face. But the cold came quickly and made a home in her bones.

Five’s hands trembled, she was freezing and burning all at once. Her ankle was curiously warm, and her right arm hadn’t stopped its aching. Her face, too, felt hot where her cheekbone was beginning to swell from the punch she had taken earlier.

_I am not going to be leaving a pretty corpse._

This thought was followed by Five’s ankle twinging suddenly, sending her lurching down a steep slope. She tried to right herself, planting her unhurt foot, and felt the bank slip out from under her. The sandy soil loosened by the rain, Five skidded and rolled over rocks and roots to crash into the icy stream at the bottom of the deep ditch.

Five groaned and, a few inches from her face, something groaned back.

Her eyes snapped open and on impulse her hand shot out, shielding her face. But it wasn’t moving, not really. Staring balefully at her from the mud, gnashing its jaw, was the head and spinal chord of a zombie. Its body was nowhere to be seen, but there was enough of it left that it was still alive. Or still undead, rather. It had been an awfully long time since whoever this was last felt their heart beat.

Carefully, Five pushed herself up so she was sitting and planted a foot on the zombie head. Even if she was already doomed, old habits died harder than even she did and she didn’t fancy getting bitten again. Leaning over the creature, now attempting to gnaw through the thick sole of her shoe, it was obvious that this wasn’t the natural decay that effected the zombies. There were clear marks along the spine and the flesh that still clung to it from a knife or an axe. The neck cut wasn’t surgically neat but it was deliberate. The head had been severed from the greater part of the body by several small, measured hacks.

This was Simon’s work. Five remembered, or rather could not forget, her forced run through his forest of hanging limbs and heads.

Which meant, Five thought, tracing the path of the stream with intent eyes, this piece of unfortunate zombie must have fallen from a tree and washed up here. Which meant she was close. Downstream. She had direction.

Standing, Runner Five took a moment to sway and take stock. With the Deadlocks gone, her greatest enemy now was exhaustion. All she wanted to do was curl up in the mud and take a nap. But she wasn’t too dizzy to stand, which meant she could walk. And if she could walk, well. She’d see about running.

At her feet the head groaned again, a pitiful, barely-there noise. Just air passing through its limited windpipe. It was so impotent Five had no hate for it left in her. The zombies were abhorrent, but this one could do nothing to her. It was a non-thing.

When Five trudged on, set on where the little gully shallowed and met the treeline, she left the head silent behind her, a neat hole in its eye socket from a small, sharp knife.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's something not quite like a reunion, and Five isn't dead yet.
> 
> With Simon now a part of her life again she's not sure how she feels about that last part.

The teeth of an undead head scraped against Simon’s upper arm and not for the first time he marvelled at how much easier it was to live when you couldn’t die.

He batted the head away and snickered as it swung back and forth, helplessly twitching at the end of its spinal cord, tied as it was to the branch of a gnarled oak.

Even before the outbreak you had to beware of rusted metal and murky water. Sneezes and coughs, animals and the outside. Infection was everywhere. Now, well. Simon wasn’t free of worries, but his health had plummeted right of the bottom of that list.

A general lack of concern for your own wellbeing made hiking through a zombie-strewn forest at dusk in the pouring rain far less daunting than it might otherwise have been. Even with the disservice his mask did his vision.

Peripheral vision was a thing of Simon’s past, but even with the disadvantage he still stopped short when he rounded the last bend of the path homewards.

There was a small hill leading up to his hut which ought to have been covered in an uninterrupted blanket of leaf litter. It was not, however, as he had left it that afternoon. Two gullies in the leaves meandered up the slope, following the path of someone’s dragging footsteps. Sticks laid carefully under the leaves to catch on careless shoes were kicked aside, and there had been no attempt to cover the tracks. Whoever had come to visit, they hadn’t been particularly concerned with being discreet.

Simon took his gun from its makeshift holster by his hip. Unfortunately for whoever had found their way through his wood, his shack was not a manger, and he was not a kindly innkeeper willing to let them stay the night.

The debris of autumn was thick on the ground and Simon moved silently across it, rolling his weight from his heel to toe with a delicacy he had never bothered to cultivate before when he could just barrel through most situations.

At the crest of the hill all ponderings on silence and strength faded when he spotted her.

Simon saw Five, not for the first time, before the barrel of his gun. He knew it was her, instantly. Even though she was crumpled into a muddy, soaked ball by his doorway, he knew. It was something about the general shape of her, her hair waving down around her face, her arms crossed across her chest. It was a familiar and unwelcome feeling, one that hit him soundly in the chest and Simon ignored in preference of putting his gun away and crossing the distance between them.

From his full height, Five looked tiny. Simon also couldn’t tell if she was breathing, which was worrisome because he didn’t know how to feel about Five being dead and that was really not something he wanted to have to examine. He crouched low in front of her, blocking out the last of the slate grey light.

At a lower level the state of affairs didn’t look much better. Five’s skin wasn’t pale, it was blue. Lifeless. The water on her glasses is gathered into little droplets which wouldn’t have mattered except Simon remembered how her glasses misted up whenever it rained and she would end up running without them because it annoyed her so much.

It really didn’t seem like she was breathing. Before that thought could go any further, Simon reached out to shake Five’s shoulder because it was an impossible situation. The implication that Five would go out so quietly was absurd.

Simon’s fingertips just barely brushed the icy, bare skin of Five’s shoulder when her eyes snapped open and she grabbed his wrist tight enough for the bones inside to protest.

“Fi-!” Simon exclaimed, only managing to get the first syllable out before Five socked him straight in the mask and sent him pitching backwards onto his butt. “Ow, fuck. Rude, y’know, Five. To come to a man’s own shack and punch him in his poor face. Ow.” Simon raised his hand as if to rub at his face, then met hard plastic and readjusted the mask instead. “Is it cracked? Say it ain’t so, Five. Do you know how difficult it was to find this? I raided three fancy dress shops before I just found it just lying around on a zombie’s face.”

Five, for her part, was now very obviously alive and breathing, her shoulders were hiked up, her ribcage heaving with quick gasps. Her hands were clenched into inarticulate fists, but the fever-bright gleam of her eyes faded as Simon talked.

Between the half-sleep and waking, Five had fallen into an almost-dream of endless grey mist and swaying, moaning figures. It dissipated now, the gloom and the chill of Simon’s forest were no brighter but they were far realer. Most real of all was his voice.

“Are you hearing me, Five? You don’t look so steady there.”

As it turned out, Five wasn’t particularly steady. She managed half a step back before the dizziness threw the trees slantways and she folded to her knees. Her hands in the leaves and dirt were less than a foot from Simon’s feet and Five wanted to cry and to laugh from relief. In that moment she could have kissed his stupid, creepy mask.

She had never thought she would feel so unconflicted about Simon ever again.

“You’re not drunk are you? I know we’ve got up to some fine mistakes on tequila nights, Five, but to sneak through Deadlock territory to visit a traitor, well. That’s a bit much even for you.”

 _“Sadly, not drunk.”_ Five signed slowly. Her hands were stiff with the cold but it didn’t matter. Simon had never been the best at talking to her using BSL, he preferred to play the twenty questions game, or, if they were short on time, to have her scrawl on her arm or his what she needed to say. Sometimes expressions had been enough. _“I came to find you.”_

For a moment Simon didn’t say anything. Behind his mask, in the half-light, there was not even a gleam from his eyes. Just darkness. There was nothing to indicate what was going on beneath it.

He had been so expressive once. Five had always known whether he was about to crack a joke, or share a secret. She had thought she’d known how to read him. This turned out to be, of course, about as legitimate a belief as the flat Earth ethos. Five had been a fool. Perhaps, as freaky as it was, the mask was for the better.

Five couldn’t deceive herself into thinking she could read whatever was left under there. Not if she couldn’t see it.

“Not just a friendly visit though, is it, friend?”

_“No.”_

“Need something from old Simon, eh? Well. We better go inside.” Saying so, Simon gathered his long legs underneath him and stood. “I don’t know about you but I’m just about sick of being out in the rain.”

Five nodded. The cold had crept with the wet through every part of her until she wasn’t sure if she was still feeling it or whether she had turned numb all over.

Simon stuck out his hand for her to take and she winced. There was a part of her that couldn’t forget Simon, her friend, but there was another, louder part that refused to forget Simon, the traitor. The friend-killer.

Time tripped over itself, drawing several moments into one long, strained one. Then Five reached to take Simon’s hand as he went to withdraw it and the both of them startled. A heartbeat passed where their hands remained, neither reaching nor retreating, and then Five planted both her hands on the ground and pushed herself up.

Already turned away and at the door, Simon pushed aside the ivy and vanished from the dusk into the true dark.

“Come on Five, you’ll catch your death. Simon’ll put the kettle on and warm us both up. Then we can talk business.”

And so Five followed and, glancing once around the woods for any tell-tale yellow of the Deadlock regalia, she closed the door behind her and plunged them into black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've not written Simon before, so any feedback at all would be very much appreciated!
> 
> Not as much really happens in this chapter as originally did, but I wanted to try to keep the chapter lengths roughly consistent so I cut the original 3000 words into two chapters. This means more Simon tomorrow, probably, because I don't have the self-control to impose a posting schedule on myself.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Runner Five has had less difficult conversations.
> 
> Some of those conversations involved a gun at her temple, yet somehow being close to Simon manages to be worse.

Somewhere beyond where Five stood, not far but not within arm’s reach, Simon was moving around. He was uncannily quiet. The kind of cat-quiet, where you only know for sure something has made a noise at all because you can feel it rather than hear it.

_When did he get so stealthy?_ Five wondered, then reconsidered. She knew when. And why. _I guess the real question is the ‘how’. He’s lost some weight but he’s still the size of a modest building_.

When he began to hum Five had to bite the inside of her cheek to stop a surprised hiss of breath. He had suddenly been closer than she had thought. Barely a foot from her. He moved away, and Five could now track him around the space as he rummaged.

That had been either to put her at ease, or to fuck with her. Five was sure it was one of those options but had no idea which. It could have been both.

“You’ll have to forgive my poor hospitality, Five,” Simon said, his voice coming from a little ways ahead and to the left. “Ah, here’s where I left it. It’s hard to keep a happy hearth when you live in a destitute hole in the ground. But I make it work!”

As Simon announced this he struck a match and his profile, smoothed by the mask, was thrown into sharp relief by the flame. In a moment, he had lit several candles on his desk-dining table, lighting up the room to improve the ambience from ‘buried alive’ to ‘Neolithic cave’. He glanced back over at her, or Five thought he did, and he waved her over.

“I’ll be wanting your help with this bit, Five.”

This sparked an instinctive squirm of trepidation in Five’s gut, but where Simon crouched was only a cold fireplace. He was stacking up logs and kindling briskly and Five considered for a moment how much he might be feeling the cold. Feeling everything. Van Ark’s treatment didn’t save him from the pain of the zombie hoard and if the briskness of his movements were anything to go by he, too, was very aware of how is was no warmer in the shack than it was out in the woods.

“It’s a little awkward for me to do this part, but you’re a handy person, Five. Get it? Handy?”

Deciding that wasn’t worth a response, Five held out her hand and Simon dropped the matchbox into it. He did so from several inches away, and as soon as he had he stood to take a step back.

Perhaps this was wasting valuable time, but Five knew it would be easier to communicate with more light in the room. She would also like to be warm again before she died. Because, stuff it, one bit of selfishness wouldn’t end the world. She had done as much as she could. She deserved to die with the feeling back in her toes.

Fire starting, luckily, had always come easily to Five. Perhaps it wasn’t a skill that got her far in the time before, it had even got her in trouble once, but in this place and time it was welcome. Soon despite being stiff from the cold she had the kindling burning bright and the bark of the logs catching.

The heat was almost too much, the flames almost too bright. Pins and needles prickled Five’s fingertips as they thawed.

“So,” Simon’s voice cut short the pleasant distraction of the fire. “While a good host would wait and actually put the kettle on, I’m pretty curious, Five. What brings you all the way out here, huh? What could you possibly need from me? I’ve already given you everything I found in Van Ark’s base. Not here for my blood now, I hope.”

Five levered herself onto her feet, one hand steadying herself against the wall. Now, between the candles and the growing fire, she could see the flash of Simon’s eyes behind the mask and she focused on them.

_“I have a final request.”_

“A what?”

_“A final request- I need you to do something very important.”_

Simon’s head was tilted down, focus fixed on her hands, but the pause told Five he wasn’t getting it.

“You’re going to have to spell it out for me, Five.” He reached across the table and searched through the various papers he had strewn about until he found something he deemed unimportant or blank enough to be written on. He held out a pen to her, dangling from his fingertips. Five scowled. “Here. Better than me trying to figure it out, right?” There was something in his voice not quite like a smile and not at all apologetic.

Turning her nose up at how thoroughly chewed the end of it was, Five took the pen. It was obvious Simon had spent long hours at this desk, scrawling and decoding and doing whatever it was insane outcasts did when they weren’t kidnapping upstanding Township runners.

As she began to write out what she wanted to say, a thought came unbidden. One of the kind Five had been keeping at bay.

_This would be so much easier with Sam._

He always understood her. They even had a code for when her hands were busy. Sam also looked her in the face, not the hands, when he talked to her. There was no one quite like him left. Sam was warm and reassuring and soft yet he had threatened to kill people to protect her. Several people, actually. Even people he had known, for her. Kind, precious Sam who kept her safe and brought her home. 

The knot that tangled in her ribcage and wrapped around her throat to choke her was expected but stung regardless. Tears pricked at her eyes, hot and nearly painful, and Five blinked furiously. She willed them not to fall onto the paper. If she hadn’t broken down before now she wasn’t about to do it in front of Simon of all people.

When she punctuated her message Five punched a small hole right through the paper. She pushed it across the work surface towards Simon who shifted his body slightly to maintain the distance between his side and her hand. It was a surprise to Runner Five that she still had the energy to be exasperated as Simon began to read her words aloud in a lilting, high voice. Meant to imitate hers, presumably, despite the fact he’d never heard it.

“I haven’t got much time left- I need you to get something into Abel for me, get it to Janine,” here Simon faltered a little, and Five felt his eyes cut from the page to her face. “Put it in her farmhouse or something. You don’t need to talk to her but it needs to get to her. No one else can see it.”

In the silence that followed, Five’s heart jumped about in her chest. If he said no, or decided he wanted some additional revenge, she was fucked. Abel was fucked.

“See, I appreciate the melodramatics, Five, I really do, but correct me if I’m wrong. You’re not going to be shot on sight for approaching the gates. You can go back to Abel any time. You can go see Janine whenever. Why are you asking me to do this?”

Five reached over and tapped the pen against the part of her message that said she had little time left.

_“Will you help?”_ She signed slow, mouthing the words.

“But why, Five?” Simon asked, leaning his hip on the table and spreading his arms overly wide. “I hope you’re not trying something underhanded against a poor vagrant with nothing left. Why me?”

_“No one else.”_

“But why?” Five felt like screaming and stamping her foot. Throwing a tantrum. She didn’t want to have to say it. She felt sick thinking it. But Simon never made anything easy.

_“I’m dying.”_

“What?”

_“I’m bit!”_

Five thrust out her arm, stepping forward to invade Simon’s personal space, and when he went to step back there was only wall. Her joints still sluggish from the chill, Five scrabbled at her bandage. Not heeding what damage she might do herself, she plucked one layer free then found where it was loosest and tugged and tugged until it restricted and then came free.

“Five, what-”

Not letting him say any more, Five threw the bloodied and soaked bandage towards the fire and waved her arm under Simon’s face with the bite angled towards him.

“Five!” Simon’s voice was hard, it had lost the airy, flippant tone he had used up until that point. He caught her arm with his single hand and for a brief moment Five felt a flash of fear as she remembered how strong Simon was despite his missing parts. How strong and how much bigger than her he was, and how he had definitely, definitely lost his mind.

Fear bled to confusion as Simon studied her wounded arm intently for an uncomfortably long minute, holding her up so she was almost balancing on tip-toes. Then, he slowly released his grip and Five snatched her arm back, cradling it. Her glare bore into the scuffed mask.

“I think you ought to take a fresh look at your arm, Five.” Simon prompted, his voice oddly flat.

Five sneered and glared, and Simon remained silent. Watching and waiting for her to look at her death sentence. He could be attempting to make some kind of joke, Five considered. Or equally likely, not, and this was a symptom of whatever psychotic state he permanently inhabited these days. Either way, it seemed, Simon was not backing down.

_Still so bloody stubborn._

That was the last coherent thought Five managed for a time, for when she dragged her eyes away from Simon to inspect her arm what she found was not a fresh wound of hours previous but rather a bitemark a week or so old. Open gore had given way to scabs, beneath which there was a thin layer of skin growing.

New, healed, pink skin. Somewhere, outside the static buzz of Five’s mind, Simon was laughing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm a creature that craves validation, so when people left commentary on Tumblr I couldn't help but post the next chapter pretty immediately. It's practically my Achilles heel.
> 
> Still not sure how I feel about writing Simon but the next chapter is very 3-centric. A bit of Simon-philosophising. Some Simon-raving. A lot of Simon-laughing.


End file.
